Bill Powers, Pres. of the Univ. of Texas, Austin: Acknowledge that Regnerus is Lying

We demand that you acknowledge that UT's Mark Regnerus was knowingly lying when he had published the following phrase in his New Family Structures Study paper in June 2012:

“the funding sources played no role at all in the design or conduct of the study, the analyses, the interpretations of the data, or in the preparation of this manuscript."

The documentation that Regnerus lied there is incontrovertible.

When Regnerus’s chief funding agency – The Witherspoon Institute – started organizing the NFSS in 2010, Witherspoon’s Program Director W. Bradford Wilcox recruited Regnerus to do the study for Witherspoon and then collaborated with him on the study design.

Note that both Regnerus and Wilcox have lied to the public more than once about their relationship in the genesis of the NFSS, that we have seen the incontrovertible evidence that they are lying and that we will not stand for their lack of integrity.

The Regnerus hoax is of course much wider in scope than just the fact that Regnerus lied about being autonomous from his funders. But to get UT’s investigation of the hoax onto an honest footing, we are demanding that you immediately acknowledge that Regnerus lied, as per the above.

For now, one additional demand.

UT’s site for the NFSS (http://www.prc.utexas.edu/nfss/) falsely states that the NFSS studied young adults “raised by same-sex parents.” That is misleading, it does not describe the study’s respondents and we demand that that wording be changed on the university’s site copy immediately.